Don't Die, Moros Intrepidus :-o

[hperk209]

I love the new species with update 5! They look great and have some really cool behaviors. The group hunting for the tinies is especially fun to watch. And all of the new species were ones I (and many others) had previously requested -- which is awesome! Buuuuut whereas most of my dinos' comfort bugs have improved (notably with marine reptiles - yay!), Moros Intrepidus is a bit of a pain. Take a look at the issue here.

I think its area growth is too low. I know it's just a scavenger, but it gets along with everything in this enclosure. Two large carnivores and other scavengers. Oviraptor, Compsagnathus both have no trouble finding what they need.

Here you can see where I've had to put three meat feeders in the hopes that it will eventually find one. But even when in 'range' of one, Moros often won't eat, or will get scared off by well-meaning medical vans before it gets the chance to. Since the other scavengers don't NEED three feeders, this often results in contaminated feeders. The dino is also complaining of water, which I intentionally place toward the rims in all my enclosures to draw them toward the viewing platforms. You'll notice it's also barely getting the Sand environmental need met, because it's only claiming the one small area that is largely snowy grass.

As long as it'll EAT, I think increasing its area growth would help alleviate these problems.

 

[dany_shady]

my moros are also constantly dying from this

 

[DawnTyrantEo]

While something to help them with exploring territory might help- e.g 'if low on need X, travel to edges of territory that contain need X if present, otherwise travel to edge of territory'- in the meantime, I find a good way to help with such problems is to add more animals. Unless you've got a giant carnivore or something, for the most part adding animals will increase the number of animals more than it increases the space needed, which means you'll have more creatures to find things they need. Only four Moros are going to have a hard time exploring such a big enclosure!

 

[Thoro]

So that means they're basically idiots. Programmed idiots, but oh well.

 

[hperk209]

While something to help them with exploring territory might help- e.g 'if low on need X, travel to edges of territory that contain need X if present, otherwise travel to edge of territory'- in the meantime, I find a good way to help with such problems is to add more animals. Unless you've got a giant carnivore or something, for the most part adding animals will increase the number of animals more than it increases the space needed, which means you'll have more creatures to find things they need. Only four Moros are going to have a hard time exploring such a big enclosure!

That's a good point and I will try that. Perhaps that's why Compys and Oviraptors didn't have this issue. Thanks for this suggestion.

 

[hperk209]

Small update: As @DawnTyrantEo suggested, I started releasing 10 or so Moros into enclosures instead of 4-5. This did help a bit with the territory issue. However, Moros still suffers from the masochistic behavior we've seen in other species, where it will refuse to eat and die of starvation. I remember this being a huge problem awhile back with Compsognathus, but not anymore. So perhaps this was fixed and Moros will get the same attention.

 

[Jens Erik]

Small update: As @DawnTyrantEo suggested, I started releasing 10 or so Moros into enclosures instead of 4-5. This did help a bit with the territory issue. However, Moros still suffers from the masochistic behavior we've seen in other species, where it will refuse to eat and die of starvation. I remember this being a huge problem awhile back with Compsognathus, but not anymore. So perhaps this was fixed and Moros will get the same attention.

Hey hperk!

What other species is your Moros Intrepidus sharing an enclosure with? I had a small problem a while ago where my Compies weren't eating while sharing an enclosure with Coelophysis. Once I moved the Compies out of the enclosure, and into an enclosure with some Dreadnoughtus, the Compies immediately started eating like normal. Maybe that could be the issue?

 

[DawnTyrantEo]

Hey hperk!

What other species is your Moros Intrepidus sharing an enclosure with? I had a small problem a while ago where my Compies weren't eating while sharing an enclosure with Coelophysis. Once I moved the Compies out of the enclosure, and into an enclosure with some Dreadnoughtus, the Compies immediately started eating like normal. Maybe that could be the issue?

Ah, yes, that's true. Perhaps it'd be worth having a metric of some sort in-game to make it a bit more obvious, and perhaps add a little extra challenge if you're using mixed exhibits? There's a few things that could be made clearer that something like that could help with; things like Compsognathus being scared of Dimetrodon, my amargasaurs spending too much time getting pushed around by gyrospheres to feed and water themselves regularly enough, what exactly 'Aggressive' means as a trait, whether Liked carnivores will eat each other, or my qianzhousaurs seeming to have an arbitrary threshold where there's enough of them in the enclosure to start attacking my tour trucks.

Something like a 'Stress' meter, perhaps? e.g 'I have been interrupted in trying to do something X times/have X stressful things in my enclosure' -> 'Mild stress: me and my buddies will gather to fight/attack/scream at something rather than flee if we get interrupted' -> 'Moderate stress: me and my buddies will proactively fight with stressful things/hurt each other in dominance fights/test the fences' -> 'Critical stress: Comfort loss/behaves as low comfort'. I feel like a lot of the problems people have with their dinosaur AI is more a matter of communication than the AI itself, like how the 'alpha injury' system was because people found it too hard to learn the Dominance system rather than because it was too hard in and of itself, so a metric for the moment-to-moment problems your dinosaurs are experiencing in addition to Comfort as a metric of their long-term conditions might help. (IIRC there's rules-of-thumbs in development for not having old exhibits break with new updates, so such a thing might not work with that, but ideally they'd only start causing problems if you were getting some of your dinos starving/eating jeeps/etc anyway!)

 

[hperk209]

Hey hperk!

What other species is your Moros Intrepidus sharing an enclosure with? I had a small problem a while ago where my Compies weren't eating while sharing an enclosure with Coelophysis. Once I moved the Compies out of the enclosure, and into an enclosure with some Dreadnoughtus, the Compies immediately started eating like normal. Maybe that could be the issue?

Yep all scavenger types were in this enclosure except Lystrosaurus (which I think is just a 'tiny', not scavenger). I'll try separating them. Thanks for the suggestion! I agree @DawnTyrantEo a stress meter would be good. I recently stopped assigning medical teams to ranger posts (and only manually tasking them when needed). I found that they were getting overzealous with starving dinos (despite meeting all comfort) and would then scare them away while they were searching for food. This is especially true of suuuuuper slow ones like apatosaurus, which takes forever to find and eat. Since I've started doing this, I've SO FAR not had another starvation issue in this park. We'll see!

Thanks both.